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Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

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Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#251

Post by jwells89 »

aresant wrote: post #42

This is awesomely reminiscent of the old school 68k macintosh era - dogcow, oscar the grouch in the trash can, etc I miss that simplicity / playfulness / aesthic of that era (yes I am old, please get off my lawn)

Even well into the PPC era Classic Mac OS carried that culture of fun third party software. Can't remember its name, but for example in the late 90s/early 00s I ran across an extension that gave dragged icons gravity and momentum, allowing the user to "throw" them around their desktop. No practical purpose, just fun.

Arguably the Kaleidoscope fits into this category too. While there were tame themes for it that did more tame things like make your Mac look like Windows/BeOS/NeXTSTEP/etc, many third party Kaleidoscope schemes skewed more whacky and fun than your average theme software. Ever wanted your desktop to look like a pair of jeans[0], a dwarven forge[1], 2D top-down space shooter[2], or cute cartoon jungle[3]? Kaleidoscope has you covered.

[0]: https://i.ibb.co/x1YsFqt/denim-scheme-dtdenimsit-vbpf.png [1]: https://i.ibb.co/fdXKKV2/eritis-forge-2-eitrisforge2sit-p5vq... [2]: https://i.ibb.co/TryF6VQ/boilerplatetm-boilerplatesit-vrao.p... [3]: https://i.ibb.co/cCLYpKL/monkeyparadise-monkeyparadisesit-ss...

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#252

Post by jameshart »

Bluestein wrote: post #137
albert_e wrote: post #123

I want widgets on Windows desktop as well. I want clock, calendar, notes, CPU and system stats, pull out or slide out menus with shortcuts, quirky ones like this one. Instead what I have is ads. And copilot everywhere. With touch screen laptops today you can do so much more. My levono also folds 360 and let's me use it as a full touch screen desktop. There is so much potential for productivity hacks and interactive U…

> Instead what I have is ads. > And copilot everywhere. You raise a serious point, oft discussed here (about the sorry state of the OS) I actually think the "whimsical", nostalgia these kind of apps (toys?) point to is actually indicative of a more serious "yearning" for simpler, higher quality, more user-configurable computing. As it was not so long ago ...

… When computers didn’t all have permanent internet connections, which limited the damage it was possible to do by having a persistent executable running on someone’s computer.

There was little to no spyware or malware risk because this was a time when stealing CPU cycles couldn’t make you money, machines couldn’t be used to anonymously generate internet traffic, and exfiltrating captured data was essentially impossible.

As soon as all the computers went online, the frivolity had to stop.

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#253

Post by [deleted] »

toddmorey wrote: post #227
jb1991 wrote: post #201

We’ve been using this in production for the last three months and I can report it has been fairly smooth overall. Only very minor downtime, and we’ve received a lot of communication from our customers about it, they like it quite a bit. So that’s been nice.

This has been a complete show stopper for my organization: https://github.com/nate-parrott/ball/issues/10 We've submitted numerous GH issues and even tried to chase the developer down on LinkedIn. But he treats the project like a fun, novelty "gift" to the community and doesn't respect the SLAs that any repo maintainer needs to adhere to for my org to put their free code in production.

[deleted]

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#255

Post by Bluestein »

concurrentsquar wrote: post #249
toddmorey wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been a complete show stopper for my organization: https://github.com/nate-parrott/ball/issues/10 We've submitted numerous GH issues and even tried to chase the developer down on LinkedIn. But he treats the project like a fun, novelty "gift" to the community and doesn't respect the SLAs that any repo maintainer needs to adhere to for my org to put their free code in production.

My team can't even evaluate Ball (as a tool for physical simulation of spherical cow-like objects): https://github.com/nate-parrott/ball/issues/9 Currently, we are using Unreal Engine 5 to do our hundreds of architectural physics simulations - the major issue is that UE5 is very slow on *the EC2 instance* (we only have one 2048 core EC2 instance shared between the entire office; we used to use Vercel and Cloudflare b…

All common issues! Particularly the cost spikes without a reasonable explanation. Also, the lack of NT support the issue you point to shows could be a problem. Ball runs fine on "M" Apple chips, however :)

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#256

Post by Bluestein »

jwells89 wrote: post #251
aresant wrote: post #42

This is awesomely reminiscent of the old school 68k macintosh era - dogcow, oscar the grouch in the trash can, etc I miss that simplicity / playfulness / aesthic of that era (yes I am old, please get off my lawn)

Even well into the PPC era Classic Mac OS carried that culture of fun third party software. Can't remember its name, but for example in the late 90s/early 00s I ran across an extension that gave dragged icons gravity and momentum, allowing the user to "throw" them around their desktop. No practical purpose, just fun. Arguably the Kaleidoscope fits into this category too. While there were tame themes for it that did m…

> Even well into the PPC era Classic Mac OS carried that culture of fun third party software.

Apple knew it lived and died by third party developer adoption.-

(Now is all "app stores", walled gardens and "where is our 30%", first and foremost ...)

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#257

Post by Bluestein »

Summerbud wrote: post #98
aresant wrote: post #42

This is awesomely reminiscent of the old school 68k macintosh era - dogcow, oscar the grouch in the trash can, etc I miss that simplicity / playfulness / aesthic of that era (yes I am old, please get off my lawn)

That is also an era filled with exploration and iteration. Althought we still explore a lot nowadays, but the vibe is quite different.

(I am afraid AIs will do most of the "exploration" for us, this days, sadly ...

... while we gladly just "prompt" - which, in itself, might be an exporatory technique. We'll see.-

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#258

Post by caseyohara »

greenpresident wrote: post #244
Bluestein wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heavy command line user, eh?

Not OP but for everyone I know the desktop is mostly either empty or a messy “temp” folder.

I treat my desktop as a temp dir and manually empty it every few days.

A desktop hygiene tip I read years ago (but can't remember where) is to increase the size of your desktop icons almost to the point of being ridiculously large, like 96x96. This way your desktop will "fill up" faster, forcing you to clear it more regularly.

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#260

Post by Bluestein »

caseyohara wrote: post #258
greenpresident wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but for everyone I know the desktop is mostly either empty or a messy “temp” folder.

I treat my desktop as a temp dir and manually empty it every few days. A desktop hygiene tip I read years ago (but can't remember where) is to increase the size of your desktop icons almost to the point of being ridiculously large, like 96x96. This way your desktop will "fill up" faster, forcing you to clear it more regularly.

(*Me fails at the "empty it every few days" stage ...)
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